In Stephen King’s 1978 short story “The Lawnmower Man,” a pagan employee of a lawn service company run by the god Pan murders a new customer with a magic lawnmower. It’s not a great story, but it is what it is. What it is not is a riff on Flowers For Algernon about a mentally challenged greenskeeper who becomes an all-powerful, all-intelligent, telepathic super-villain thanks to early ’90s virtual reality technology. Stephen King sued New Line for slapping his title on a completely different screenplay and advertising the film with his name. I think about this more often than I should, because how the hell did anyone think they could get away with that?

Anyway, the film version of The Lawnmower Man is about to get a second chance at being a thing that exists: it’s being developed as a VR series, which is so on-the-nose that I expect it to cause a nasal fracture.

In 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus—a scrappy start-up dedicated to resurrecting virtual reality—for $2 billion. Since then, every major player in the tech space (from Google and Microsoft to Sony and Samsung) has begun to prepare for a very virtual future.

With this incredible technology now on its way, I’ve spent the past couple of years working on a new book about the unlikely heroes of this virtual reality revolution. During that time, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with those in the burgeoning VR industry and, at some point, almost inevitably, The Lawnmower Man—the 1992 sci-film film directed by Brett Leonard—eventually comes up.